Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are looking to automate their warehouse operations to keep pace with their growing businesses. Effective warehouse management is necessary to maintain the right quantity of inventory items and finished products. The challenge lies in seamlessly managing multiple warehouses distributed across multiple locations.
With an ERP tool like SAP Business One, the warehouse management feature enables small manufacturers to optimize their inventory and production processes. Let’s look at how the SAP Business One (SAP B1) warehouse module solves all warehouse-related challenges for SMEs.
Benefits of SAP B1 Warehouse Management
Here are some of the business benefits of warehousing with SAP Business One:
1. Real-time Inventory Tracking
With the SAP B1 warehouse module, organizations can accurately track their incoming and outgoing goods. Automatically updating stock levels can accelerate any warehouse’s “pick and pack” cycle. It, in turn, means faster deliveries to vendors and customers. Additionally, SAP B1 features GPS tracking to map transported items during transit.
2. Improved Visibility
With its barcode scanning facility, SAP B1 warehouse management enables organizations to monitor every warehouse item. This enables them to have improved visibility into their production and warehouse system. With SAP B1 customization, organizations can create item categories and streamline their inventory process.
3. Automation
SAP Business One enables small manufacturers to automate their warehouse management system. It means replacing manual or repetitive processes with automated processes, thus reducing both business costs and time. Thanks to warehouse automation, companies can improve their labour efficiency and optimize labor costs.
4. Optimized Space Management
For small businesses, warehouse space comes at a high cost. This makes it crucial for them to optimize and utilize their available warehouse space. With SAP Business One, organizations can monitor their inter and intra-warehouse movement of goods. This provides enhanced visibility, thus enabling them to optimize the space used to store goods.
5. Improved Organization of Items
With the “track and bin” feature, SAP B1 enables organizations to locate any stored item in their warehouses easily. Using barcodes, you can track an inventory item with a unique unit address. This helps in improving the organization of warehouse items, thus resulting in lesser wastage and more time efficiency.
Next, let’s discuss some of the main features of SAP B1 warehouse management.
Features of SAP B1 Warehouse Management
In SAP Business One, the Warehouse Management System (or WMS) is packed with multiple features for the benefit of enterprises. Here are some of its leading features:
1. Multi-bin Functionality
With its multi-bin functionality, SAP B1 enables organizations to manage their inventory based on the bin location in the warehouse. SAP B1 users can define up to four sublevels in each warehouse, representing an aisle, zone, area, or shelf. A warehouse and sublevel code defines each bin location.
2. Cycle Counts
With this functionality, organizations can periodically check if their on-hand stock in the warehouse matches the stock in the SAP B1 system. Additionally, organizations can perform stock-taking each time they receive or ship an order. After configuring the cycle count, every new and existing warehouse item is updated with a cycle count code. The system notifies the assigned personnel whenever the cycle count goes below the minimum value.
3. Pick and Pack
Pick and Pack is optional in the organization’s sales and production cycle. This functionality allows manufacturing companies to pull items from the inventory system quickly. This feature is useful for organizations with large warehouses and a dedicated team for collecting, packing, and shipping inventory items.
Pick and Pack in SAP B1 enables companies to locate sales and production orders and requests for inventory transfers. They can also reserve invoices based on delivery dates and order priority.
4. Pricing Lists
SAP Business One features various pricing lists with predefined prices for selling or purchasing any inventory item. With this feature, companies can create unlimited price lists, assign various currencies, and pre-assign them to selected customers. Additionally, they can configure price discounts based on order date, percentage, quantity, and payment mode.
5. Gross Pricing Lists
With SAP Business One, businesses can identify a pricing list as a gross price list. This is useful for companies that work using gross pricing for their customers. After configuring this feature, they can choose if a particular customer or vendor can use net or gross prices on their payment terms in the business partner master data.
Conclusion
The SAP Business One warehouse management module enables small manufacturers to improve business efficiency by automating warehouse and inventory processes. As an award-winning SAP business partner, Praxis Info Solutions has enabled small manufacturers with various warehouse management solutions to handle their growing business. We have a growing team of SAP Business One experts to help SMEs adapt to changing market requirements. Here is a recent blog on the features and benefits of the SAP B1 workflow management tool.
Do you want to streamline your warehouse management process? Contact us today.